Limbo
by MinxyRock
Summary: The summer of her up coming sixth year, Hermione is wrestling with the one major issue she's been fighting to ignore for a long time...and neither Harry or Ron can help her.


Revelation Chapter 21:7-8...over the past five months, she's read those lines over and over againe. Each time she read the ancient text, skimming it with her fingers, it made her feel worse. Like a painful soar she couldn't stop picking at, an ever present bruies she couldn't stop prodding. Hermione was paying, paying for all of it, now that she was leaving her adolescent self behind, and she knew she would continue paying.  
The letter shouldn't have come to her at all.  
Sorcerers. Sorcerer ... the word slunk into her conscious, slithered over the crevices in her brain, and hissed accusingly in her ears:  
"_You magic-maker, you sinning, sinning, **sinning** little heathan...you couldn't stay away from me if you tried. You're in too deep_."   
The word was allot uglier than she remembered. That was what she was now and have been for almost six years. Hermione felt like she should have known better, even at eleven years old. Swallowing hard, her throat felt like it had been scraped raw with a pumice stone. She closed the book and drew a shaky breath, setting it down with probably more care than was necessary. Now what? What was she going to do now? She couldn't just stop going could she?

(..._You magic-maker_.... )  
  
Hermione Granger was sitting on the edge of her bed, in the room she had been sleeping in for almost sixteen years, just coming to terms with an issue she had been avoiding since she got her letter from Hogwarts. She would rather stare at the leaf print wall paper she meant to change herself, if she had to, rather than think about that.  
There are reasons she went on the way she did.  
  
(..._you sinning_....)  
  
She focuses on the academic part of Hogwarts so she can forget about the sacrilege; she began feeling it start to puncture holes into her soul at the end of each day in her dorm last year; that was a particularly hard time, Harry being the way he was...she had her own problems, but did she rant and rave at the nearest person? No, no, no! Hermione almost can't believe it took six years to face this. She was beginning to realize just how sticky her situation was and didn't think a letter to Ron or even Harry would help. If she doesn't believe it is a sin, perhaps it won't be; there's more to Hogwarts than just a bunch of hocus pocus, right? Only false divination was a sin, right, that's what it says, right, right?? A person can be damned to hell for simply pegging themselves as such a terrible sinner after all. It was in the heart and the mind, wasn't it?  
"_Don't worry about it sweet heart; if this is something you want to do, then you go for it, okay?"  
_ Dentists and doctors all seemed to have an issue with the book that sat before Hermione on her bedside tabel. She was only eleven when her parents told her that, and it didn't take much for her worries to be put in the back of her head. Little did she know it would be rearing it's own ugly head with a vengance a couple years later.  
  
(_sinning, **sinning** little heathan....)_  
  
Five years down the road, Hermione felt she was too far gone to be forgiven and it wasn't the same as telling a lie to her parents about staying out late or sneaking potions ingredients from Snape's private stores; this was different, this was real. Her childish fantasies of going to an enchanted school and learning enchanted things were clashing with her home life and Jesus the Christ; his hot, dry breath from the ancient desert and the cold wind that blew across the damp stone walls of Hogwarts were creating a thunderhead in Hermione's chest that she couldn't even describe in writing, one of her favorite things.  
  
(..._you're in too deep,_ )  
  
Yet still, Hermione brushed away the trickling tear she had been determined not to shed even in the privacy of her room, and picked up her quill. If she didn't finish this summer home work, if she didn't do something academic, something to shove the issue a little farther away, she'd break apart. The scratch of quill on parchment was harsher than usual. The letter shouldn't have come to her at all.  
  
(..._you couldn't stay away from me if you tried_.)


End file.
